The best and worst thing about 2023 was how it gave us genuine hope that maybe… the movies are back? The seemingly unbreakable stranglehold that effects-driven action blockbusters have had on popular cinema for our entire adult lives was shattered by, of all things, an existentialist Barbie movie and a J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic. (The latter also dethroned the repugnant Bohemian Rhapsody as highest-grossing biopic of all time, a victory for good taste we never thought would happen in our lifetime.) Disney lost the global box office for the first time since we started this blog, and the Oscar nominations were so good people had to make up reasons to be mad at them. There were so many great films that picking winners for these awards wasn’t just difficult, it felt faintly insane. Films that might have swept other years barely got a look in. Even our full slates of nominees, linked at the bottom of the post, represent just a fraction of the greatness on offer.

Nevertheless, we did, eventually, painfully, manage to pick our winners. As with every year, we gave one award for each of the eight major Oscars: we care about most of the others (except for the fake awards like Best Original Song) but this post would be absurdly long if we picked those too. We each did out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only come from films that both of us have seen and nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We also each gave a Special Achievement Award for something that doesn’t fit our other categories.